Newsfeeds

It’s amazing how much we rely on our sense of sight. Most of the information we get about the outside world is via our eyes. So, when that is taken away, our other senses must really work overtime. And for someone who is used to sight and suddenly loses it, it can be incredibly disorienting. […]

The Americas had been populated quite heavily for centuries before Europeans set foot on its shores. And as those Europeans moved inland, they found more and more tribes, each with their own ways of life. In Wendake, players take on the role of chief of a tribe living near the Great Lakes. Over the course […]

Halfway through the week already? Man, it sure does seem to fly on by. We’ll see if today is its usual “seemingly longest day of the week” or if we can get on through it. But any way you look at it, we need to make sure our energy’s up, whether it’s a quick couple […]

The Solthecian Church has taken over the Union in Guild Ball. In Season 4, they’re going to be the Minor Guild for the team, and a bit of restructuring will be done as some players get shifted around as to who can and can’t work for whom. But, since they’ll be their own Minor Guild, […]

Drupal 8's built-in config system is a HUGE step forward. However, now that the community has a couple of years of building Drupal 8 sites behind them, various limitations have surfaced: various common workflows are not natively supported; core's config APIs have missing functionality. While many of these problems have contrib workarounds, often these solutions can conflict with one another, and there's no one set of best practices that works for all.

If you’re a fan of horror and the macabre, you might wish that there was an RPG out there that really got you. One just full of strange and grotesque scenery and settings, with themes that really look to stretch your mind and twist it into incomprehensible shapes. Well, Xas Irkalla might be just what […]

The monsters are coming back to town this fall, as Privateer Press will be rebooting their Monsterpocalypse tabletop miniatures game. They’ve posted up a new preview, giving us a look at a couple of renders, as well as an updated TerraKhan figure. From the post: TIME TO KAIJU INVASION: T-minus 5 months…. Ten years ago […]

In Lowlands, players will be in control of their own farm along the North Sea coast. It’s a rough and rugged land, where the weather can turn instantly. You’ll have to work hard to maintain your land. But maintaining isn’t going to be good enough. You need to be able to upgrade it and make […]

Like Invader Zim, Hey Arnold was a show that I just missed watching, as it came on right after I stopped watching Nickelodeon. However, also like Zim, I know that it’s a rather beloved show by many with a following still to this day. So I know many of you will be excited to know […]

Twenty-five years ago, CERN released the World Wide Web technology into the public domain. Below is the document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993. I love the disclaimer: no warranty was provided.

Sites have truly unlimited opportunities in Drupal 8 — they are not even limited by the “website” concept! They can go far beyond it, and easily exchange data with all imaginable applications. Special opportunities for that have appeared thanks to built-in web services, which are listed among Drupal 8’s main improvements. Let’s see what web services can give you, how they work, and what extra special options are added by other Drupal 8 modules.

Here’s an example area to steal for your game generated using my 100 Overland Descriptors Table article. Like the example in that article, I’ve rolled 5 results, and used the first two as general descriptors for the whole area, and the remaining three to apply to sub regions. My rolls are:

So for the overall area we have a frigid icy land with ice-encrusted trees and grasses and crawling with slimes fungus and insect monsters. An area like this isn’t likely to be very hospitable to people, so it’s probably populated mostly by semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, fishers or herdspeople, whose insect livestock graze on what tough icy grasses are available. By the coastline, inhabitants gow an oily saltwater wort. Further inland there is less vegetation and the soil becomes rockier, making agriculture and gathering harder, but there are also flights of large grasshopper like bugs for those willing to travel this far. Technology in this area is fairly primitive and because the light construction suits the nomadic nature of the inhabitants and its ready availability, tools, weapons and armor constructed of hardened chitin are in common use. We’ll set the whole thing on a large bay.

Well inland there is a skeletal forest home to a plague of shield sized beetles that range out during the day and strip the nearby countryside of vegetation then return to roost. Among the trees is a village of long low stone and log buildings. The locals gather the dung from the beetles in rope baskets, mix it into a slurry with sea water delivered via a miles long stone lined chanel from the ocean and grow a variety of fungus for food and alchemical purposes, including a few fungus beasts that are barded in chitin armor and used to defend the village from intruders and wildlife.

In the middle of the bay there is an island just large enough for the village perched on it. Slickrock village subsists mostly on fishing and wortfields on its coast, but it is also home to several large longhouses built of logs and packed with mud. The Island People have historically stayed out of the conflicts of the various fishing and farming villages and the many roaming tribes of the Rymereach and are equidistant from most people. After a long history of arbitration and peacemaking, they set up these longhouses to serve as government buildings and house delegations and representatives. Now any major trade deals, territory arguments, and other issues are resolved at regular conclaves here.

Encircling the Rymereach is a long stretch of saltwater marsh. While this area would usually be a great resource for the people living in the area, choked with saltwort and rife with biomass, it is said to be cursed and few people will brave even it’s edges. Silence hangs over the marsh and it seems to be devoid of the wildlife that it should host. Those who have braved it’s frigid knee to waist deep muck have reported feelings of being constantly watched, movement seen in the corner of the eye, and strange high-pitched calls, though they have returned with huge pieces of petrified chitin that belong to no known type of insect.

I’ve also drawn, scanned in, cleaned up, and labeled a rough map of the area.

I plan on making several more of these articles and would like to commission some simple maps like the one above. If you think you might be interested, send an email to mapcom.gnomestew AT gmail DOT com. Include the word Details in your subject line and hopefully my filters will respond to your email with more details immediately.

Support the game designs and theoretical work of As If Productions. Written especially for roleplayers, GMs, game designers, artists and neophiles who are interested in experimental applications of narrative engineering.

"Our culture is not real, it is artificial and far from the natural instincts of the earth, to survive in it one has to develop an artificial self, and this personality, this persona, this mask, hides from the world our inner truth."